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Hi all,
my first introduction to computers (1976!) was on an HP "Desktop Calculator" - a thing the size of a suitcase, with a cassette drive on the left and right. I was working for a government research establishment. The cassettes were for loading programs. The screen was tiny and displayed text only, but joy of joys, there was a racing-car game: turn-based, a plotter would mark where your car was on a racetrack, after you input steering-wheel angles, percentage acceleration (negative for braking), and other bits and pieces. With 4 players, a lap would take an hour to complete.
A scientist in the facility postulated there would always be a place for "hybrid" computers - a combination of digital and analog (where circuitry was used to perform complex mathematics, that were beyond the digital machine to process accurately and quickly). By the mid-1980's, he was proved wrong.
Oh, I still have a slide rule that I bought for high school. I tried showing show it worked to my young daughter and she asked, "Why would you use that instead of a calculator?"
Cheers,
Michael P
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